NY food banks seek $16 million in state funding to restock their barren shelves

Food banks across New York state are running out of food due to rising need and falling benefits. Now they are asking the state legislature for an additional $16 million in funding, just to keep the shelves stocked through the end of the year.

Throughout New York, about 2.6 million people have trouble
affording food, and must make the difficult choice between eating
and paying for other necessities like rent, medication, child
care or transportation, according to the Food Bank For New York
City. So they turn to food pantries to help. Yet those same
locations are running short on food.

“Being in New York [City], I think, is both a blessing and a
curse. I mean, there is a lot of food, there is a lot of people,
we’re a big city, but we’re also a city with very high
need,” Triada Stampas, Food Bank For New York City’s vice
president for research and public affairs, told RT’s Alexey
Yaroshevsky. “There’s about 1.4 million New York City
residents ‒ so just here in New York City ‒ who rely on food
pantries and soup kitchens over the course of a year. That’s
about 16 percent of our population.”

The Food Bank For New York City is the supplier for one of the
city’s biggest food pantries, where the shelves being fully
stocked is the exception, not the rule, she noted.

“We’re seeing food banks and soup kitchens reporting food
shortages at much higher rates than they had been before,”
Stampas said. “In one month alone ‒ last September ‒ 60
percent of the city’s food pantries and soup kitchens reported
running out of food.”

The situation is even worse in the rest of the state, leading
Hunger Action Network to ask the New York legislature for $16
million in additional funding… just to get through the end of the
year. It would be a mere drop in the bucket out of the $2.6
billion in currently unallocated funds in New York’s 2015 budget,
Yaroshevsky reported.

Michael Berg, the director of an organization that runs three
food pantries in Ulster County, told AP that requests for food
there have risen by about 20 percent each year for the last few
years. In Albany, a coalition of 53 food pantries says it is
seeing its highest demand in its 36-year history.

Contrary to the stereotype that people visiting food pantries are
homeless and jobless, most customers are employed, but it’s still
not enough to put food on the table without help.

“Most people who actually use pantries are actually the
working poor. And they are working, they just don’t get paid
enough money,” Susan Zimet, director of the Hunger Action
Network, told RT. “Also, a lot of seniors who have not seen
their Social Security increase keeping pace with the cost of
food, they cannot afford food. You also have veterans, veterans
are not getting paid enough to support their family and then be
deployed overseas.”

“On a local level, people are falling further and further
behind,” she added.

Food banks across the country have had to do more with less for
nearly two years now, ever since the US Congress cut federal Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program benefits ‒ food stamps ‒ by an average of $18
a month. About 40 percent of those receiving SNAP benefits then
turn to emergency food services, leading to an increase in
demand, according to the New York Times.

“Benefits were cut in November of 2013, and the result in New
York City has been a loss of more than 56 million meals for
people who were receiving them,” Stampas said.

Despite the state doing “relatively well” at feeding its
hungry compared to the rest of the country, New Yorkers now miss
about 100 million meals each year, and 37 percent of food
pantries say they have had to turn away needy people because they
ran out of food, the NY Times reported.

“Dutchess County Outreach in 2013 saw an increase of 40
percent of people coming to the food bank, food pantries.
Pantries up here in the Albany area have seen anywhere from a 20
to a 30 percent increase,” Zimet said.

Along with asking for more money from the state, food pantries
are focusing on giving their customers choice in what foods they
receive, as well as cutting waste.